scim/Arch oddness (was Re: [tlug] Japanese page has been revised)

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

Scott Robbins wrote:

> At any rate, if the pacman packages don't work, just get the three
> source ones that I list there, and install them.  It works perfectly.

Except that, in my curmudgeonly way, I insist on installing all 
non-distro packages under /opt/<package> ;-) So ./configure failed for 
scim-anthy ... claimed it couldn't find anthy/anthy.h, no matter how 
hard I tried to tell it.

But then I gave the Arch binaries another try, and noticed something 
interesting:

  1) $ scim -d  *appears* to fail. Doesn't seem to do anything from
     .xinitrc (actually .Xclients, but that's more-or-less the same).
     So then I try it in an RXvt, and it prints an error message saying

       Failed to load x11 FrontEnd module.
       Failed to launch SCIM.

  2) But if I subsequently launch a GTK app from the same terminal window
     (does it have to be the same one? not sure yet), a SCIM widget
     appears in the corner of the screen, and Japanese input is available
     for that app.

Weird, huh?

It kind of looks as if you need to have some GTK/Gnome stuff running on 
your desktop (with LANG set to ja_JP.*, maybe?) for SCIM to start up. I 
run a really minimal desktop (windowlab, nice wallpaper, that's about 
it--no G-anything, until I want to actually use a GTK program).

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA